About Me

Blog Archive

Search This Blog

Tuesday, November 01, 2016

`Beauty's Cast-Off Clothes'

Why
have I never heard of J.B. Morton (1893-1979), who, under the pseudonym “Beachcomber,”
took over the “By The Way” column in the Daily
Express in 1924? He wrote six columns a week until 1965, when it went
weekly, and published his final column in November 1975 ("Lawnmower Used on Vet's Whiskers"). Why do some English
products thrive in America and others sink mid-Atlantic? I learned of Morton by
way of an American, Morris Bishop (1893-1973), in his essay “On Light Verse,” the
introduction to A Bowl of Bishop
(Dial Press, 1954). Bishop describes Morton as a practitioner of “surhumor.”
That’s his coinage. It’s related, he says, to nonsense, but is characterized by
“the elimination of logical mid-terms.” As an example of surhumorous verse he
offers this by Morton:

“George
Eliot was so like a horse

That
bookies on the Gatwick course

Shouted
the odds against her when

She
came there with some gentlemen;

And
there was always quite a stir

When
bookies put their shirts on her.

“But
doubt creeps in. The Mill on the Floss

Was
never written by a hoss.”

A
cheap shot? Of course. Insensitive? You bet. Is Eliot the author of two of the
greatest novels in English? No argument here. Was Morton mistaken in judging Eliot’s
physiognomy a tad equine? Hardly. In 1869, 26-year-old Henry James, after
meeting Eliot, wrote to his father: “Yes, behold me literally in love with this
great horse-faced bluestocking.” Was that James’ final word on Eliot? Are you
kidding? He judged Middlemarch “a
very splendid performance” and, with Balzac and Hawthorne, Eliot was surely the
principal novelistic influence on the novelist James would become. My point is
that it’s possible for a reasonably complex human being to respect and even
love people while making fun of them. Mockery and silliness are not hatred or
bigotry. I’ve never read another word by Morton, but I’m grateful to Morris for
the laugh. Here’s Bishop in his introduction:

“The
aim of poetry, or Heavy Verse, is to seek understanding in forms of beauty. The
aim of light verse is to promote misunderstanding in beauty’s cast-off clothes.
But even misunderstanding is a kind of understanding; it is an analysis, an observation
of truth, which sneaks around truth from the rear, which uncovers the lath and
plaster of beauty’s hinder parts.”

Ultimately,
Bishop’s apologia for light verse resembles that dreaded thing, a Philosophy of
Life: “Sorrow looks inward, meditates and searches; joy laughs, acts, and has
no need to think. Sorrow and tears come first, then; joy and laughter are
second. Poetry comes first, light verse second. Light verse cannot exist
without poetry; light verse is the moon to poetry’s sun.” That last phrase is a
prescient echo of the title of Pale Fire
(1962) by Bishop’s friend Vladimir Nabokov. The novelist took the phrase from
Timon of Athens: “The moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches
from the sun.” Bishop brought Nabokov to Cornell University in 1948, and
remained his closest friend at the school. I’ve read Bishop’s biographies of Pascal,
La Rochefoucauld and Petrarch, and recommend them all. He represents a species that
went extinct long ago. Bishop is urbane, witty, learned, gentlemanly and without
pretentiousness, the besetting sin of academics. He can be brutally funny but
never rude. He reminds me of what Shirley Robin Letwin wrote in The Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and
Moral Conduct (1982):

“[The
gentleman] has firm convictions about what is good and true, for which he will
fight, without forgetting that nothing in nature prevents other men from
questioning his verities and that he himself cannot keep hold of them without
support from others to keep him aware of what he has overlooked or distorted.
But whatever disagreement he encounters, however uncongenial he may find his
neighbors or his fortune, he will always be thoroughly at home in the human
world because he can enjoy its absurdities and has no ambition to overleap
mortality.”